A cockpit attack opens The National's Truth and Reconciliation night, and half a million tune in
The September 30 broadcast led with the flydubai flight, gave most of its hour to residential school survivors, and closed on an astronaut two days from launch.
CBC News: The NationalStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 538,398 views a day, 22 times a normal first day on this channel (24,937).
CBC News: The National | Passengers stop cockpit attack on Dubai-Tel Aviv flight
A full evening of The National, posted the morning after it airs, usually finds about 25,000 viewers in its first day. The September 30 broadcast passed half a million in 20 hours, more than twenty times that. Another full broadcast broke out a few days earlier, as we reported here.
The program opens on a story that has traveled well beyond Canada. Passengers and crew on a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv rushed to help after a stabbing in the cockpit. That segment runs about three minutes, followed by a short piece on Benjamin Netanyahu calling one of the passengers a hero. The channel stayed with the story the next day, sending Susan Ormiston to Mumbai, home city of Captain Smit Machchhar. He is the pilot who was stabbed, and people there are praising his courage.
Most of the hour belongs to another subject. September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and the broadcast gives long stretches to survivors telling their own stories, to the search for missing residential school children and to the question of keeping reconciliation a priority. The night's news from British Columbia also touched the day: a pickup truck hit pedestrians outside a Metro Vancouver mall, near an event marking it.
Near the end comes The National Interview with Joshua Kutryk, the Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot chosen as a Canadian astronaut in 2017. Two days later he lifted off on Crew-13 for the International Space Station. The channel's clip of the launch and a short film of his Grade 6 teacher watching it from Cocoa Beach have so far drawn only a few hundred views each.
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- Channel
- CBC News: The National
- Subscribers
- 2,200,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 863,542 (on a normal day: 724,711)
- Video published
- October 1, 2026
- Video views so far
- 501,574 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 538,398
The numbers
One evening broadcast pulled far ahead of what The National's full programs usually draw.
